Social Analytics on Prop 8 & DOMA – Infographic

Social Analytics Infographic

Working for a social analytics company that measures gazillions of sources on the Internet is pretty interesting. The big deal about Big Data is that social listening gives Marketers the opportunity to move away from a monologue marketing model and to a social dialogue marketing model in order to jump-start word of mouth – and word of mouth gives Marketers exponential and free real estate to make an impression on closed, interpersonal communities.

This week we decided to measure the social chatter surrounding the Supreme Court (for the Twitterati, that’s #SCOTUS). We measured from around 9AM on March 26th to 4PM on March 27th, capturing over 600,000 pieces of social content with our social analytics suite Meltwater Buzz.

What we found from an overall sentiment view wasn’t necessarily surprising given the self-selecting nature of those using social media regularly. That’s to say, from a social analytics standpoint, the pro-marriage-equality chatter far, far, faaaar outweighed any chatter supporting Prop 8 & DOMA / opposing same-sex marriage.

The story from a Marketing perspective, though, was the incredible response to one extremely well-organized campaign, and a few well-worded tweets. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) absolutely dominated Facebook and Twitter; their #marriageequality hashtag was far and away the single most tweeted term, with 190,000 mentions in the time frame we measured. To put this in perspective, the #marriagequality hashtag received about 30% of all social mentions, period, earned 44% more chatter the Supreme Court itself (131,000), had over twice chatter of DOMA and Obama, and outdid Prop 8 itself by almost 4X.

The HRC’s social dominance continued to Facebook, with a red-and-pink version of their logo taking over avatars here, there and everywhere. This blogger is only sad that social analytics don’t recognize images (even Facebook can’t do it… yet!), so how much uptake there was numercially is a metric that, sadly, will remain a mystery. But at a glance this campaign was enormously successful, with profile pictures changing consistently over the 2-day period that the trials were held.

Sophisticated social analytics provide marketers with the tools to not only measure their campaign efforts, but to look at multiple data points before, during and after a campaign in order to glean the sort of business insights that will help them adjust their next campaign. By honoring the the 4 C’s of social media marketing – Community, Conversation, Channel, and Campaign – the HRC was able to dominate social chatter by jump-starting viral word-of-mouth.